


Fifteen Things You Never Knew About Hogwarts

by Siria



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Gen, N Things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-09-21
Updated: 2005-09-21
Packaged: 2017-10-03 22:41:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Argus Filch has looked after Hogwarts since the age of fifteen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fifteen Things You Never Knew About Hogwarts

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Fyre for betaing.

**1.**

Argus Filch has looked after Hogwarts since the age of fifteen. He's lived in one little bedroom there since he was eleven. It's the only home he can remember, and he lavishes as much love and attention on the hallways and rooms of the school as he does on Mrs Norris. He can map hallways and rooms in his head, spends his days scouring floors and polishing picture frames, and his nights planning the best ways of freeing his beloved school from the twin vermin of Peeves and students. He likes to boast that there isn't a room or nook or cranny of the building that he doesn't know.

**2.**

He's wrong, of course. There is no one still alive who does, and even Slytherin didn't know them all. There were four Founders, after all, and they never trusted one another entirely.

**3.**

The house-elves know all about the Room of Requirement. They found it out even before Dumbledore did. They meet there every first Wednesday after the new moon. They are never going to reveal what it is they do there, because they keep their own counsel, and it is best not to ask.

**4.**

Over the main gateway of the castle, there is a large copy of the school crest, carved in stone. It doesn't date as far back as the Founders, but it's still very old. The bright paint that once picked out the fur of the badger and the sheen of the serpent has long since worn away, and the letters which proclaim this to be 'The Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry' in an elaborate Gothic script are worn and crumbling and fading away. They can still be read, though, and every time a student passes underneath that gateway, they look up and their eyes trace those words. It's a familiar thing, a comforting thing, a reminder that this is the school of witchcraft and wizardry, and that this is where they belong.

**5.**

The words are wrong, though. Hogwarts is not a school of witchcraft and wizardry; Hogwarts _is_ witchcraft and wizardry.

**6.**

The tallest building in Hogwarts is the Astronomy Tower, which stands fourteen stories clear of the ground. Inside, 297 steps twist in a spiral to the top. Fred and George Weasley know all of these steps intimately, since they were forced to count all of them one February evening by McGonagall during detention. She was standing there waiting for them when they reached the top (though with no broom; they're never quite sure how it is she got up there), and told them to turn right around, go down the steps, and count them all again. "Just to make sure there's the same number going down as there are going up," she said with a twist to her mouth that passed for an amused grin.

**7.**

There weren't.

**8.**

Hogwarts stretches even further below the ground than it does into the sky. It would go further into the ground, but when Slytherin delved, he awoke things there that disturbed even the keeper of the basilisk. Hogwarts' power comes just as much from the land it is built on as its people, you see.

**9.**

Whole areas of the attics have been abandoned by people, and magic has moved in to fill the places they have left behind. It interacts with the spiders and the mice, the old portraits and the broken toys, in strange ways. When the rocking horse with the missing tail creaks and shudders suddenly in the attic over the Hufflepuff Common Room, it is not because it has been pushed by a sudden draught of wind.

**10.**

Space is always relative inside Hogwarts. No matter how many of Gryffindor House spill in through the portrait hole after dinner, there is always enough room for a comfortable crowd, and there is always enough couch space for full and sleepy students to sprawl when avoiding homework. "Tardis," Harry says sleepily, when Hermione wonders about it; she laughs at that, and though Ron doesn't understand what Harry means, he smiles to see her happy.

**11.**

The boys' bathroom on the fifth floor near the Arithmancy classroom is traditionally where couples in their final year go on the last day of school. They carve their names into the wood as a way of leaving a little bit of themselves behind together. The class of 1977 occupies a small spot about halfway up the wall of the third cubicle in, sandwiched between the class of 1954 and the class of 1936. They're all dead now, or all but dead, or insane, but their names are still etched deep into the wood, surrounded by the flickering, waving outline of a heart.

**12.**

The students learn in their History of Magic classes that the Muggles were never a real threat to the wizarding population during the Dark Ages and the medieval period. Most of the witches and wizards of that era survived unscathed (even Wendelin the Weird), and they never needed to defend themselves against the Muggles. This is all true, for the most part, and the students accept it. They never look around at their surroundings while in this class, and they never question why they are being told this in a building made of walls three feet thick, walls pierced with arrow slits and portcullises. Hogwarts was clearly made as a place of refuge, and a place of siege; it never occurs to them to wonder why, and the stones aren't going to tell them.

**13.**

The stone that Hogwarts is made of is a warm and glowing honey-gold. If you look closely, you can see tiny flecks of quartz that glow with all the colours of the rainbow, and some colours that have never been seen outside of magic. It's a puzzle as to where it was quarried from, because there's never been another stone found in the British Isles quite like it.

**14.**

It's always a little warm to the touch, too, when you brush a hand against it, even in the depths of a Scottish winter. It's best not to think of this too closely.

**15.**

Hogwarts is still only wood and stone, though. And one day, Hogwarts will fall.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Fifteen Things You Never Knew About Hogwarts](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4806392) by [Siria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria), [sisi_rambles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sisi_rambles/pseuds/sisi_rambles)




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